The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Earlier this spring I met a girl on one of the many dating apps I reluctantly use. It turned out to be one of those life-changing romances you mostly only read about in novels. Most of the time I have trouble feeling comfortable around people, and yet the vibes here were totally instant. We hit it off right away and just sat by the town river cuddling and talking for several hours on our first date, and the second one went even better. I've only felt so instantly connected to and comfortable with someone once before in my dating life and that was a long time ago. After that we slept together, which I would honestly rate as one of the highlights of my life. My judgement is naturally clouded my hormones, but she really was perfect: more than I would dare hope exist.
You've already guessed what comes next. Soon after our fourth date she rejected me over the phone one evening when I was coming home from a trip (ostensibly because of my political beliefs, but you never know).
This has already been a less than stellar year for me due to job-related reasons, but losing her was devastating. I fell into a lighter depression, and I have been low, low, low since the day she left. Only the last month or so have things gotten somewhat better. I still think about her often and I still feel like something that could have been really special vanished for no good reason; but I can distract myself with other activities and sometimes feel like things are maybe okay. A lot of my moments are nevertheless even now spent listening to Townes van Zandt and thinking about death.
The ordeal has also got me thinking and reflecting a lot about my lovelife, especially since the intimacy with her was so exceptionally wonderful. I'm now in the later part of my twenties, and I have had sex a total of four times in my entire life (and that is including this encounter). This is about a couple of hundred times less than I had hoped to have by this point. If someone had told the teenage me that I was in for more or less a decade long dry spell I think I would've been horrified. But it has become this way gradually, day by day without a girlfriend and with no other willing partner, and only now when auditing the records of my life has it really hit me how badly things have gone. The aforementioned girl was younger than me, yet from the conversations we had it's clear she already had way significantly more experience than me in this field. Same thing when I compare myself with my male friends. I am obviously and painfully doing unusually poorly.
By many other metrics things are going decently well for me. At the same time I value women and sex highly, I can't help myself from doing it, and I remember looking forward to having sex when I was teenager. I have since tried my luck on dating apps and in my social circles, and despite all my attempts it now more and more looks like my younger years will soon have passed with very limited success with the opposite sex. Looking forward I am also not feeling optimistic. In particular the prospect of becoming 30+ and attracting women the same age who've already had their fun and now want someone "serious" to settle down with doesn't appeal to me. I don't want to be practical choice rather than a romantic one. I'm sure in this modern world it's terribly entitled and sexist of me to think like this, but I value youth and beauty in women, and it's something that I want to experience more in my life.
In the year that's coming I'll likely try to make some changes to my life and put myself out there, try and salvage the situation somewhat as best I can. I think history is a good predictor of the future when it comes to things like this though, and another miracle-woman like the one I opened this post with seems unlikely.
I don't know what I hope to achieve by posting this here, or what advice or encouragement I hope to hear. Still, a lot of your are cleverer than me: maybe someone here will figure out something smart to say.
I know how that can feel. The explosive sense of intimacy you can feel with a new person, learning rapidly about them and feeling them learn rapidly about you. The way time compresses and someone you know for just a day can become such an important part of your life. I still remember a girl I met at a college visit in 2010, we locked eyes at orientation and had this sudden intimacy, spent the whole weekend talking and kissing. I didn't end up going to that school, we exchanged phone numbers and texted briefly but I never spoke to her again. The weekend was something, but it fizzled out and cashed out to nothing.
I feel for you. That sudden flash of intimacy can cause one to dream all kinds of things in a hurry. But at the same time:
I can count a half dozen moments like that across my life, and I"ve no doubt you'll be able to as well, if you live long enough. These occasions of perfection in chemistry are rare, but not singular unless you choose to make them so. So this woman turned out to be less than expected, or you fumbled the bag, so what, you'll find another. And as for this whinging...
Romance is a capitalist market, you're entitled to what you can get. If you can't get what you want, raise your capital value and make yourself someone who can get what you want.
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I posted last week about trying to drink less. I went 5 days sober, which is at least past the alcohol withdrawal hump. I'm on vacation currently, and a bit of peer pressure and boredom led to me breaking my very short sober streak. I'll continue sobriety experiment when I get back from vacation. Which sounds like famous last words, but I will follow through. The first five days of no drinking was easy enough, and the results felt good.
Not sure if anything I said last week was at all helpful but some more stuff to add: alcohol is really bad for you. I think we all are aware of this, but we mostly kinda ignore it (minus the whole "a glass of wine is fine" thing that more recent research has called into question).
It makes it harder to lose weight, it fucks with your sleep, it causes multiple kinds of cancer, your liver is robust but liver problems are one of the worst ways to die, one of the few things that can very easily kill you withdrawal, etc.
It can certainly be worth it, but health reasons to stop can be pretty motivating, and it's relatively common, even with more mild to moderate use, to find that cutting it out makes you feel a decent amount "better."
On a pointless academic note: alcohol withdrawal can last for multiple weeks but that's rare and would be vanishingly unlikely to apply in this case (5 days is a reasonable rule of thumb however).
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212 days sober here.
What's your goal in regards to 'drinking less'? If it's literally just getting the number of drinks over a week / month down, then all you should worry about is tracking your drinks (plenty of apps for that) and looking for a gradual trend down. Eventually you'll find a sustainable level.
But is there something else? Are you worried your drinking is getting you fat and out of shape (it is) or that it's just sort of generally reducing your cognitive sharpness even if you aren't hungover every day(it is) or maybe that it's having a mild negative effect on mood stability? (it is)
If you want to quit. Quit. Hard sober for the rest of your life? Not necessarily. I think a good goal is to do 365 days sober and keep a log of how you're feeling about every 10 days or so. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn how to deal with out of nowhere cravings. You'll understand more about emotional and stress triggers. "Sober Octobers" aren't long enough and I feel like "stay sober for as long as you can including up to forever" creates an all-or-nothing kind of thinking that can lead to hard relapses (fun fact: a lot of programs have definitions of sober that allow for some level of drinking. I think this is absurd, but that's a personal opinion).
In my experience so far, the physical and mental health benefits are obvious and unambiguous. Social situations aren't difficult to navigate after you've said "no thanks" about 10 times. (As another aside, just use "No, thanks" or "I'm not drinking tonight" as your responses. Don't get into any more detail than that - that's when people get weird. Be ready to repeat yourself. A lot. )
The tradeoff is that my life is fundamentally more boring. Alcohol, like other drugs, is a quick hack to emotional regulation. How it manifests will be person dependent. For me, I no longer have any reflex to drink if I am sad, stressed, overwhelmed etc. That's a great thing. I miss drinking now when I am feeling very good. A Big Business Thing happened at work a few weeks ago and, when it did, I really wanted to tie one on on a friday night knowing that not only did I have nothing to do on Saturday, but that I could probably take a few days off the next week because of the big win.
I cleaned out some old home depot boxes in my garage instead. Anti-climactic.
I'll tie it off here. Start at the beginning; what do you want your drinking life to look like?
Talked about it in last weeks thread. But id like to be a social drinker, having a few drinks one night a week if I'm out with friends or something.
Right now I'm closer to averaging about 4 drinks a night every night. That's too much and the health effects seem noticeable.
I slowly and unintentionally shifted into heavier drinking. I think partly as a treat for myself as I struggled to eliminate sugar from my diet.
I find stopping the drinking to generally be easier than stopping sugar.
I'm in better shape and health than I was pre-pandemic when I actually was a social drinker. Not saying the alcohol helped at all. But I started exercising weekly, cut out sugar from my diet (and cut carbs a bunch, but not entirely), and started intermittent fasting.
I don't want to entirely quit drinking for the one negative you've stated: life is more boring. My life is already very boring as it is, and it honestly frustrates me. Especially during extended periods where I have no social activity outside my immediate family. Drinking allows me to have fun at social events. I'm too much of an introvert when I'm sober.
I'm in pretty much the same boat as you. I'm not an alcoholic, but I do drink pretty much every night. Mostly out of boredom. Every night is like:
choice A: stay home alone. Watch TV, play some pointless game, do a pointless hobby. boring. only fun with drinking. choice B: go out to socialize. All of the "sober crowd" activies are incredibly boring, people are just much more fun to socialize with when everyone is drinking at least a little. And it's more fun with more drinks, with a pretty damn high upper limit.
It doesn't help that one of my activities lately has been listening to comedy podcasts or standup. Those are both significantly better with drinking.
I do disagree on the "upper limit" part. I like it best just being a little tipsy. I'm a little louder, a little more willing to talk instead of just listening, and laughs come a little easier. Getting too drunk I get too loud, I talk too much without listening, and I laugh at dumb things that aren't fun to remember the next day. Also I throw up easily, so too drunk is just a bad time for me.
I also enjoy standup and yeah. there's a reason so many of them require you to purchase at least 1 drink. I hate the people who go there stone-cold sober and just sit there refusing to laugh or show any emotion like "this is very serious business and I will not laught for anything less than the very highest levels of comedy."
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You've got a handle on the situation. I think you'll put together a good plan.
The only thing I'll admonish you for - and it's only because you mentioned in three times in the post - is the "I gave up sugar" line.
Booze is concentrated sugar. That's the whole point of it. One immediate effect of going sober; you'll likely drop 5 - 10 lbs with zero other changes to diet and exercise habits.
It's a common myth, and I'm not sure where it started. But no, booze doesn't metabolize into sugar. It gets broken down into something more like a fatty acid if I remember correctly.
Perhaps the myth is because blood sugar levels can spike while drinking. The liver will prioritize metabolizing alcohol over maintaining blood sugar levels.
I absolutely do not remember enough biochemistry from medical school to know off hand, but a brief lit review gave me these:
"Alcohol has a high energy content, and this energy is utilized by the body as efficiently as the energy in normal food. Ethanol has such good properties as a substrate for energy production that we are faced with the problem of explaining, not why it is consumed, but why it is not consumed in still larger quantities by nonalcoholic humans or by animals. When alcohol is consumed by animals, the intake of food decreases in relation to the caloric content of the alcohol; if a choice of macronutrients is possible, alcohol decreases the consumption of carbohydrates most."
"Step 3 Much of the acetate produced by the oxidation of acetaldehyde leaves the liver and circulates to peripheral tissues where it is activated to a key Acetyl CoA. Acetyl CoA is also the key metabolite produced form all major nutrients- carbohydrate, fat and excess protein. Thus, carbon atoms from alcohol wind up as the same products produced from the oxidation of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, including CO2, fatty acids, ketone bodies, and cholesterol; which products are formed depends on the energy state and the nutritional and hormonal conditions."
My main recollection is that it's shockingly energy dense but I don't remember which form of metabolism it most mimics. The above implies probably none of them, with the "it becomes sugar" perhaps being related to the carb's bit in the first quote, or the way it can absolutely fuck you up with hyperglycemia (which does not necessarily require pure sugar intake).
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Interesting. I didn't know that and had just absorbed the myth.
This makes me wonder about weight less after alcohol cessation. I wonder if it has more to do with poor eating habits that often come with drinking and, perhaps, some sort of digestive disruption.
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My guess is that the myth started the way that @cjet79 mentioned below - the majority of alcoholic drinks that have been consumed do have quite a bit of sugar (or simple carbs that are readily converted to sugar in the case of beers). If you're drinking cran-vodka or wine or beer in any appreciable quantity, you're getting quite a bit of sugar with it. The calories from the ethanol itself are obviously not going to help either.
If someone doesn't want to change their total EtOH intake but does want to cut the sugars and even maintain a keto diet, they can switch over to sipping neat whiskeys instead of pounding beers. I would also say that for anyone that isn't into alcoholism territory, this will tend to downregulate the amount of alcohol consumed pretty naturally. It's so, so easy to just sit there and drink 4 IPAs over the course of 4 hours watching TV shows and doing nothing. Pouring up four whiskeys feels weird in a completely different way. The high alcohol content makes the whole thing seem much more clear and intentional rather than it blending into the background and feeling the same as just drinking some tasty soda that happens to have alcohol. So, yeah, this one weird trick will tend to cut a lot of drink calories out of people's diet - just drink hard booze neat.
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Weight loss from stopping drinking shouldn't be too surprising, what you mentioned, plus: Plenty of alcoholic mixed drinks and cocktails are filled with sugar. And most beers are heavy on the carbs. Some wines are sugary (usually cheaper wines that add sugar, and dessert/port wines). Basically some people are probably drinking the equivalent of half a soda can per alcoholic drink. College kids gaining weight makes a lot of sense to me.
I heavily changed my alcohol consumption habits as part of the diet changes. On most days I'm doing a 12 hour fasting window, and some days an 18 hour fast so that helps with giving my body time for digestion (I keep any drinking within the eating window). I switched away from heavy beers and sugary cocktails to low carb beers and straight liquor.
The sugar and snacks and late night eating also impact hangovers. I went from bad half day long hangovers to basically not getting them. Which is part of why I think I started drinking more, there wasn't as much of an immediate next day cost as there used to be. Very frustrating to make progress in one area of my health, only for the slack I created to be used to degrade my health habits in other areas.
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Ethanol itself is 7cal/g in theory, but it's not fully metabolized in practice. So a pint of Guinness (4.2% abv) contains 210 calories according to the label. If you have three, it's 610 extra calories, enough to ensure a caloric surplus for that day. But you probably drink it with snacks, and it's easy to double or triple the calories with crisps, cheese sticks and wings.
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A question--as I'm approaching my personal goal of 30 days sober--why not have a drink (I mean you)? You seem to be set against it, or, put more positively, you seem set on staying sober. I will be at my in-laws soon on August holiday, and I quite enjoy that first cold beer with my father-in-law. Your post here has a foreboding about it, a definite anti-booze vibe, if not a direct or preachy one.
Perceptive as always, Doctor Hale. (I mean that sincerely and with admiration)
There was a time when I needed to be what I call "hard sober." I mentioned this on a previous Sunday thread I think, but in 2023 I was drinking heavily all the time. Never had a rock bottom moment or crisis incident, but from about Halloween through Christmas I came face to face with the fact that I was definitely full throttle on that Highway To Hell.
I think I passed that time somewhere between 100 and 120 days. Like I wrote previously, that's about the time when I no longer thought about drinking to relieve negative emotional states. It was almost a tangible shift and I am happy about it.
Why not have a beer now? I think being sober revealed that there was more work "under the covers" to do. I complain that my life feels more boring - because it is. Well, perhaps I should consider developing some interesting hobbies or otherwise inject dynamism into life. There's another perspective that says, "hey you got to the point in 2023 where you were getting after it pretty hard consistently ... what's to prevent that same thing occurring again?" So, proactive prevention is part of it too.
I'm not anti-drinking. Aggressive teetotalers are much the same as aggressive atheists; their rabid anti-religion is a fervent faith all its own. I am, more than I used to be, leaning more in the direction of "know thyself; and know thy limits" for some people, drinking just is to high risk even if they aren't problem drinkers or full blown alcoholics. In a very discrete case, I had a college friend who had severe loss of motor function and balance even when mildly intoxicated. It was a bizarre and scary sight to see; coherent speech (no slurring) full awareness of surroundings, but all of the kinesthetic ability of a new born deer. For others, it might be that they don't turn into Barry Blackout on the weekends, but they're slow motioning ruining their lives. I've also seen monster drinkers who seem to be immune from hangovers and have objectively high performance lives.
To maybe close with a little pithiness; arbitrary life long decisions are almost always bad. "I'm doing XYZ just because!" isn't a reason to do anything. My reason for not drinking so far is pretty simple; I keep waking up and thinking "Eh, don't feel like drinking today."
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I am back in my hometown, my flight to Chiang Mai had to be delayed since my co-founder fell sick. I also psychiatrist-hopped and finally got a prescription for Methylphenidate. It is sold under the name Concerta which is 18 mg, I got Inspiral which is 5 mg and it kicked my ass. I did not feel anxious but felt a lot of brain fog and drowsiness during the day. But zero sadness. I enjoyed life. I am on 5 mg and will take 10 mg in 3 days.
Besides that I have started reading again, I am reading funders at work now. I can also do isometric workouts plus I lost a lot of shit weight, down from 77 kgs (170 lbs) to now 72 kgs (159) lbs in the past two months since quitting sugar. Besides that, I still am a little scared about the future but I am really really ambitious and will be fine with any amount of pain that comes with startups as long as I can make myself rich.
I will start reading Faust after this though, I got inspired to do this by this ig and youtube account named mystalgix that makes ps2 era type nostalgic art of houses, suburbs, skylines and castles. There is something really serene about castles and European towns that have these structures right out of a fantasy game. European cities, the old ones that still don't have many major modifications are a sight to behold. India lacks clean green areas that are accessible, safe and livable for some reason. Overall I will document my journey with methylphenidate. Would love to hear what you folks think.
I strongly recommend the Atkins translation of Faust. Avoid any rhyming translations...
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Note methylphenidate is considered a controlled substance in Thailand. I might check the embassy website to see the best way of bringing it in and how much you can legally bring (I suspect a month with a prescription but I'm not sure.) You may already know this information, of course.
You're a party pooper, I wanted our own r63 sequel to Bangkok Hilton.
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Married men of the motte, I need a sanity check.
To put it bluntly, my partner is lower status and less intelligent than I am. 110 vs 125 IQ points. middle class vs upper middle class.
We've been together for a year and our relationship is otherwise great (unrelated mental hang ups i have posted about here before aside). I can see myself marrying and being content.
Unfortunately, I am a pretty HBD-pilled individual, and the concept of my future children potentially being less intelligent and of phenotypically lower status fills me with dread. (The woman in question has many many positive qualities I DO want my kids to have.)
Is it over? Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc? Are doubts like this normal for a young guy who's maybe getting commitment anxiety?
I come from a family of fairly accomplished people. Upper middle class academics and some geniuses. Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.
My children would inherit this.
Now I should add that her family is of perfectly average to above average intelligence. The biggest difference is that they have very little intellectual curiosity. Abysmal levels of general knowledge, archetypical shape rotators.
(They do have their own opinions and are independent thinkers but they are deeply "practical people")
I thought this wouldn't bother me, and it doesn't, in the relationship. But I dread my kids being like that.
Narcissism? Does my girlfriend secretly disgust me? Am I giving this too much thought? I really want some outside opinion on this, preferably by people with children. This is obviously something I can only talk about on this forum.
This post really bothers me. Please value things other than raw intelligence more. IQ is good to have, but there's also work ethic, kindness, being pleasant to be around, various artistic disciplines that aren't that g-loaded, etcetera.
Elon Musk isn't literally the smartest man in the room, it's a combination of IQ and his almost pathological work ethic. Someone with his work ethic and a 110 IQ could easily still accomplish amazing things, just not quite as amazing.
Edit: Although in the world we live in I can see how one might become skeptical of the virtue of kindness, since the people who would have maybe been avatars of kindness in different circumstances are indoctrinated and crazy.
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You're just finding reasons to get cold feet.
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I think entering parenthood with the mindset that your children (or worse, a single child) must be equal to or superior to you by every possible metric is setting yourself up for disappointment, similar to the modern idea that your spouse must also be your best friend and that if they don't share all your niche interests then you aren't really soulmates and should find someone else. Your best bet is to have multiple children and hope that collectively they embody all the characteristics you value in yourself and your partner, or if it matters enough to you wait a few years for genomic prediction technology for embryos to improve (even if they only screen for health, that is still correlated with IQ and also makes it an easier conversation to have).
Perhaps I have a different perspective on the heritability of social class, seeing as my grandparents were illiterate peasants, but I think it at least needs to be normalized to opportunity i.e. if they, and more importantly your partner, are conscientious and working to improve their station in life, wherever they may have started, then that is a sufficient demonstration of value.
I think if there's anything potential descendants of us motteposters could use a dose of to become well-adjusted members of society, it's this.
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You are both far above global average intelligence. Other factors such as your parenting style, how quickly you start having kids, where you raise them, and how many you have, will probably contribute more to your odds of having intelligent kids than your choice of wife will.
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You know what would best contribute to the well-being of your hypothetical kids, barring some giant leap in embryo selection or tremendous wealth? Young parental age. Lower probability of various defects, and parents (and hopefully grandparents!) energetic and healthy enough to give them all the play and development they need.
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Man, this thread is an advertisement for the utility of the concept of infohazard. All I can think is that you would have been much, much happier if you'd simply absorbed the completely false polite fictions around intelligence and heredity that so many people believe.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be burdened by knowledge than live in ignorant bliss in most cases.
Are there situations where not knowing something bad will happen might be better? Sure. But not in most cases. If I had metastatic pancreatic cancer that would kill me in a year or two, I'd live my life very differently, and maximize it to the best of my abilities instead of being blindsided.
In this particular case, the social fiction is clearly to the detriment of his goals and values. He could probably knock up a gorgeous bimbo and have a great time doing it, except when his kids turn out to be dumb(er) than he is. They might be better looking, and that's certainly a perk, but I'd have to look very good to trade even a small number of IQ points for it.
His understanding of heridity makes him strictly better off, even if it causes him some pain such as the prospect of having to break up with a perfectly nice sounding person in the hopes of finding someone better (and there's no reason to assume he can't). C'est la vie.
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What are your odds of finding someone "better" who you can gel with?
No idea. I gel with her perfectly well thats not the problem.
I didn't imply you weren't currently gelling. I'm saying that even if you find this high class high IQ unicorn, you simply might not get along as well with that one. Abandoning a perfectly fine thing for a chance at a better one is probably a bad idea, unless you have someone specific lined up.
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I feel like this is some kind of troll, but just on the off chance -- somebody of your (claimed) IQ should know that IQ (heritability in general, really) does not work like this at all. "Lower-middle classness" even less so.
Proof: I have a quite a bit higher IQ than either of my parents. So did Von Neumann, Einstein, and innumerable other smarties (one assumes).
This is a very bad thought pattern you've gotten yourself into, and that's a you thing. Seek help, touch grass, log off, whatever it takes.
If you can't manage this, my advice to your girlfriend would be very different.
Class and inteligence are both very heritable. Choosing my partner is by a wide margin the most control I have over how my children will turn out. I am trying not to live with regret, which is why I want the perspective of parents who have already made tge choice.
Well you have it in me -- I'm smarter than my wife, and my parents. I'm not Von Neumann, but scored very high on a pro IQ test in the 'keep smart kids from getting distracted and/or BTFOing their mediocre teachers" stream at school, and (smart) people at work seem to think I am worth asking about smart-guy stuff.
My kids are pretty smart, my wife & I mostly get along, and I'm sure they will have successful, (mostly) happy lives going forward. What more could one want?
(You are quite incorrect about class being heritable in the genetic sense, but I don't have time to fight your egregore on that -- maybe spend a few minutes thinking about how that would work?)
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Von Neumann and Einstein are necessarily extreme examples! Say IQ is 50% heritable, then the argument still goes through via expected value, although the magnitude is lower. Regression to the mean is a bitch.
Isn't regression to the mean responsible for the phenomenon in which even if both parents are very smart the children are likely to be more average?
Life is a crapshoot -- it's not clear to me at all what the true expected delta in IQ would be from having a 130 IQ mother vs. 110. I'm very confident that in terms of life outcomes this effect would be utterly swamped by having a loving stable family -- which I'd venture may not be the case here, and not because of anything to do with the proposed mother.
(I think 50% heritability is not supported by The Science either? This is not a rabbit hole I want to go down though)
I'm very confident it isn't, tbh, plenty of successful people come from bad upper-class families. And wouldn't this be 'shared environment', which is measured to be approximately zero?
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Indeed, because 50% is too low for the heritability of cognitive ability. For example, this NatureTM study with ~400 citations proffers a heritability figure of 66%.
Note that this does not mean 66% nature and 34% nurture. The 66% is a subset of “nature” and the 34% is a superset of “nurture.” The 66% contains only additive genetic effects, a linear combination of inputs from DNA. The 34% contains what’s generally considered “nurture,” as a certain wholesome copypasta helpfully encapsulated: "Reading [your children] stories at bedtime, making [them] go to sports practice, making sure [they] had a healthy diet, educating [them], playing with [them].”
In addition to “nurture,” the 34% also contains stuff like other non-additive genetic effects, maternal (and maybe paternal) age effects, developmental error (whether it be positive or negative) while in utero, the crapshoot of life you mentioned, and other factors. With heritability as the lead singer by far, "nurture" might very well be the third singer in a three-man acapella group, as suggested in Figure 1 of the above study.
It’s clear to me, assuming both parents revert to an IQ of 100. We can even relax the 66% to 64% for a “beta” of 0.8 to make the arithmetic a bit easier optically.
If you believe you have an IQ of 125 as in the case of OP, that means a parental midpoint of 127.5 with a 130-IQ wife, a parental midpoint of 117.5 with a 110-IQ wife. 100 + 0.8 * (127.5 - 100) = 122. 100 + 0.8 * (117.5 - 100) = 114. So an 8-point delta.
Is an 8 IQ-point delta significant when evaluating the effect of a potential future mother of your kids, holding all else equal? A 114 expected value is well-within sub-110 IQ territory for any given offspring, an at-least-one standard deviation gap between your 125-IQ self and a possible hypothetical child.
An 8 IQ-point delta is the equivalent of about one and a third inches in height. One and a third inches can make a material difference in height, especially when it comes to tail effects, if you’re hoping for a son who does well in business, athletics, and/or in dating on expectation. 5'10.67" vs. 6'.
On the flipside—and I don’t know about the particular situation of @Sheepclothes—however, in an age where smart young men are often dying of thirst, maybe it’s not the best for them individually or on a societal level to advise them toward being mineral water critics (to appropriate a line from Succession).
This arithmetic exercise also highlights the importance of a spouse’s familial background—or at least ancestral background—when it comes to mean reversion. The smarter (dumber) his or her family or ancestral background, the higher (lower) mean to which your offspring will revert.
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Tests and some fudging to protect privacy
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Since you asked, to give the other side, I think you should split up, so long as you're young-ish and would be dedicated to finding a new wife afterwards. You're going to spend two decades of your life raising the children, each individual moment working, consciously or not, to help your children be successful in life. And the highest impact thing you can do to ensure the kids have successful, interesting good lives is to ensure they have good genes. The idea marriage is about entirely personal romantic feelings detached from other material considerations is a modern one, an idea of irrational, overpowering romantic love isn't new but it coexisted more with real interests in the ancestry and health of the children. I wouldn't worry about the lower-class part - a lot of of smart people come from middle-class families - but the intelligence part is more important.
Also, HBD generally refers to the association of race and IQ, which is very contested. The heritability of individual intelligence is less contested, it is the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's just extremely obvious.
You probably do love her? Romantic love isn't an overpowering metaphysical principle that overrides other facts or beliefs. You can genuinely love someone and at the same time rationally (or mistakenly) think being with them is a mistake.
To some of the points from other commenters:
I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children. Being successful and intelligent are attractive! And surely their intelligence and general mental qualities are more important than how tall they are or what their waist/hip ratio is! Most of the people replying to you, like most people in general (due to assortative mating), will likely marry someone of their social/economic class, as that's just what we instinctively do. (Assortative mating for class is stronger than for IQ, which on an individual level is imo a mistake). The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic! Part of the "meaningfulness" of being a parent is protecting the kid from things like that! And yet... (I'd enthusiastically bite the bullet on every unintuitive consequence of this thought experiment)
Interactions between people aren't symmetric when the interactions have other effects! It's good when a company fires a bad worker, even when the person firing them wouldn't want to be fired themselves. It's a good thing that the smartest archaic human 500k years ago tried to pick a smart partner and didn't settle for a dumber one because it'd be mean to do that! It's how we got here.
This is just, like, false? Whether it's high school math, basic facts about how the world, government, economy, etc function, or the ability to accomplish one's goals, intelligence is enormously important. To the point that if your wife was 85 IQ (or even 100), you wouldn't have gotten together in the first place because the contrast would be too apparent.
I strongly suspect the last commenter's wife is not an average person, they're an intelligent practical-minded person, and a genuinely randomly-selected person would produce different intuitions. It's berkson's paradox https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png for "academic" vs practical intelligence.
You make some good points, but are you a parent though? Im fully aware of the exact statistical difference this partnership will have on my offspring. I only care how succesful and capable my future children are, insofar that future me will care.
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Hell yeah, this is the pedantry I crave late at night. :D
My objection here is that for something to be a program, it needs to be intentional to that effect. Simply being driven by subconscious biological urges and social tendencies isn't enough. Calling something that happens as the byproduct of other forces a program strikes me like calling humans furnaces because they turn fuel (calories) into heat. It's kinda true in a sense, but not what one normally means when they say that word.
I think this is a stronger argument, although I think that unrealized gains are nowhere near as bad (all else being equal) as actual concrete losses. And I also think that people here way overrate the importance of intelligence. Realistically, if OP's kids turn out to have 110 IQ instead of 125 that's not actually a big deal. OP gets along great with his 110 IQ girlfriend, doesn't he? Why would it be a problem if his kids are as smart as their mom? It's not like it'll prevent them from being successful and happy in their life or anything like that.
I think the question I'm asking is why, if you're already 'unintentionally' (but even then it depends on what you mean by intent - you may not have the full goal in mind, but you're actively using your agency to pursue the goal of a high-status, capable partner in ways that aren't just unthinking reflexes, and that's why OP doesn't have a truly average IQ girlfriend even if it'd have been easier to get than his current one) pursuing that goal, what's the issue with intentionally doing it, given it's a valuable goal?
But in this example the five year old's 130 IQ points are unrealized, right? Five year olds, whether or not they're in the top 97% for their age (ignoring some regression to the mean), are still pretty dumb. I don't think you can appeal to a physical property to separate the realized intelligence that's in the child's genes and future neurons but not actually current brain quite yet, vs unrealized intelligence that's not in the genes yet. Other than the way that other humans think about it - but then that's what's up in the air in the discussion.
Idk, I think intelligence is valuable. I mean, the complex experiences and challenges we have as humans are just, experientially, better than the ones that rabbits have. And intelligence is what lets us do that. The ability to work on meaningful, self-driven, complex projects in the modern world is something that I wouldn't have if I were 100IQ! No complex software development, no amateur politics or philosophy, no $work, etc. I wouldn't be able to get much out of the posts here. I'd even have to play different video games. I've spent a few weeks really sick recently, and was a lot dumber than usual, and it sucked! I agree the kids won't be any less happy, or any less individually act-based 'moral', or love their family less, if they're 100IQ ... but mice can do that, there's a lot more to life that you can miss out on.
I think you have to get to, like, 70 IQ before you start despairing that your kids are going to fare no better than mice.
Well, yeah, but I'm responding to the argument that the kids will still be "successful and happy in their life" - mice can eat a lot of food from a cornfield and have a lot of pups, most of why we value being human are the specific experiences we have and the way we can take action in the world, and that's something you get a ton more of if you're smarter. It is just better, as an experience, to be a software developer or writer than it is to be a janitor. Even the music you can make, or appreciate, improves as you're smarter.
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It seems to me like you are far too focused on the idea of children getting good genes. Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself. It sounds like your girlfriend is fine (it's not like she's a moron whose company you can't stand, or you wouldn't have made it this far), and your relationship is fine. The only problem seems to be that you're getting in your head about something that isn't even important.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I want my children to be better than I am, with every possible advantage in life. Because I love them.
I find it bemusing that there are putative parents out there who don't strongly value their kids being taller, stronger, smarter, more driven and beautiful than them. And given that the state of the art in gene therapy is woefully behind what it could have been in a sensible universe where ludditism doesn't run rampant, the best way is to find someone with the kind of genes that contribute to making them that way.
I work harder than I need to, live my life very differently than I could if all I cared about was maximizing hedonism or my short term satisfaction, because I want to give my kids opportunities I didn't have, the same way my parents sacrificed so much for me and would do so again in a heartbeat if they were handed a time machine.
I wouldn't marry someone pretty and dumb, I take pains to make myself better so I can demand the best. Am I perfect? Hardly. Still, I bring enough to the table that I expect to keep someone happy, happy enough to have kids with me, who, mediated by the unavoidable roll of biological die, can turn out in many different ways.
I intend to load the dice in my favor, and I 100% endorse what @curious_straight_ca says. You can find someone you love and who you can look forward to making your kids the best off they could be.
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What it sounds like is that you're more educated and wordcelly than your
wifepartner is, not that you're so much smarter that having children with her is some sort of huge Life Efficiency loss.More options
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Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?
I can't imagine the feeling is good. Or maybe you're just that kind of pragmatist. My (less snarky) take: If you are lucky enough to meet a woman you love, then further that luck when that same woman loves you, and then you show yourself to be among the truly blessed and manage to be healthily and happily married, and then, miracle of miracles, get her pregnant and she carries the child to term and has a boy or girl with no complications, then you've really had an amazing good fortune that many in history have not. If you then have further children, then you're lucky beyond measure. To be sure, so are a lot of people, but then that's for lack of a better term survivorship bias.
My opinion here should be clear. HBD may be observable and to some degree predictable. Unlike many here I am not particularly interested in or swayed by that idea. Plus I'm probably more a romantic than not.
OP if you are high IQ as you claim, you will stop reading after this post. Unless you have a candidate ready to swap to immediately, as in you are currently having an affair with a high IQ high-class woman who wants to have your babies, you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Or are you very attractive and confident that there are many women willing to sleep with you? In that case maybe your thinking is sound.
For what it’s worth yes IQ is clearly heritable, but my dad was the “smart” one (bootstrapped out of poverty and worked as both an engineer and in finance) and my mom was below-average, in both cases the grandparents were peasant serfs with no more than a 5th grade education. And I am smarter than my father. So it’s not written in stone that your kids will be an exact average between 125 and 110, you might have a me and pop out a 130-135.
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This is probably the most spot on thing in the entire thread and I hope OP really takes it to heart. Not everyone is so lucky to get all these things, and it is foolish to throw away the good thing one has because "well maybe I could do even better". People who do that often live to regret making that choice, because it turns out they couldn't do even better.
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Having some doubt after a while in a relationship is normal, and it does not surprise me that for a mottizen it expresses itself in this way. You should ask yourself whether you really think this, or whether you are rationalizing your own cold feet.
That said, being a strong proponent of some level of HBD as well, I can understand this fear. But there is nothing wrong with shape rotators or pragmatism. Arguably, the biggest biological winners of modernity where workers and farmers, while many intellectual families struggled to even keep their numbers steady despite living in splendour. I don't think history vindicated an attitude of intellectual genetic purity. Your children will still resemble you substantially, and maybe a little bit less depressive self-consciuousness might be a good thing. You say she has many desirable qualities; You should imo aim for such a good mix, instead of pure IQ-maxing (though I agree that IQ should be considered disproportionally due to its importance).
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I'd argue that conscientiousness is at least as important as intelligence, so from a pure genetic perspective I'd be as mindful of that as much as intelligence.
If she is as much more conscientious as you are intelligent your kids will likely come out ahead of where you are.
Lastly, I'm sure most people have some doubts at about a year into a relationship and start window-shopping, usually overestimating their own market value. How desirable are you really to a partner? Perhaps this is the best you can do. Odds are that you did your best to get this relationship and that you can't do much better. That doesn't have to be the case for you but it's the likely case. Don't piss away a good thing just due to some strange internet reasons. If you're really worried then you can compensate by rolling the dice more times through having more children.
I think you mean you conscientiousness? Though contentiousness might be an entertaining quality as well.
Yeah, thanks. I've been a bit out of it lately.
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I mean if you are not married then I would say that you should not marry right away. I do think that the IQ of the maternal family plays a role quite certainly so do think about it before marrying. She might have some really smart brothers maybe but I do not know how much I can say on a wellness Wednesday thread.
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Do you like your wife? Do you think the world would be a better place with more people like your wife in it?
Yes and yes. That is a much healthier way of framing things, immediately makes me feel a lot better about having children, thanks!
It still however leaves the fear that i will feel alienated from my own children and the belief I have failed in endowing them with the capacity to achieve great things.
But it could just be projection from my much more intelligent father never saying he was proud of me or something.
(We are not married)
Sorry, sorry, potential wife.
My children are not yet capable of a coherent conversation. I still find them wonderful and amazing; the last few months have been pretty tough, and interacting with my eldest has consistently been the largest source of genuine joy and contentment in my life, to the point that several times I've stepped away from crises with work to simply pick up and hold them.
There are times when I might have been tempted to claim that I was smarter than my wife. I know a lot more about history, philosophy, politics, pretty much anything academic, and she certainly lacks my encyclopedic knowledge of banal gun trivia. And yet, she is miles better at most practical matters than I am, and it turns out that those practical matters are extremely important every day of the week, while my academic knowledge is mostly useful for arguing on the internet. My life improved massively by all objective measures when I married her, and if I lost her it would immediately get much worse by those same objective measures, completely ignoring the emotional and personal factors.
If my children take after me, I hope my wife will be able to teach them a great deal of her practicality; my life would have certainly benefited from more of it. If my children take after her, then it will be my job to try to compress what insights I have down to a level their capability and inclination can make use of. Intellect that cannot be communicated has scant value. I am likely always going to be "smarter" than them, simply because I'm much older and have much more data and experience; the question isn't whether they're my intellectual equal, the question is whether my intellect is sufficient to the task of making good humans from scratch.
My father was quite critical, and I think I've inherited a double-portion of his critical nature, but this is something I'm aware of and can try to compensate for. I'm critical because I see how things could be better, and I want them to be better, but nothing gets improved without the motivation to strive, and criticism is not a good motivator for most people. So, again, the test of intelligence is not whether I can find flaws, but whether I can motivate improvement. I'm proud (and terrified) that my eldest can climb a ladder. I'm proud that they can hold a pencil. I need to cultivate and communicate this pride to them, teach them that focused, purposeful effort is the essence of value, that that I am proud of their growth.
More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense. Self-deception and rationalization scale in direct proportion to intelligence. Von Neumann was not, in fact, the God-Emperor of mankind; he was in the end successfully yoked to a society of his supposed inferiors, and his more unique ideas were thankfully discarded by those same supposed inferiors. Intelligence is not isomorphic to Goodness, but rather is values-neutral. There are no shortage of examples of the harms caused by intelligence turned to evil ends, and no reason to believe that a dramatic increase in intelligence, either on the individual or societal level, would alter the human condition in any fundamental way.
I suspect your wife is intelligent, and specializes in something different from you. Most people are not that intelligent, and are mediocre at both practical and intellectual tasks! You didn't randomly select a wife from the American population.
Do you think that, if society had an IQ cap of 100, we would understand quantum field theory, or general relativity, or have most of the technology we use so much? This is a bizzare statement. The average person mostly can't do algebra, and genuinely doesn't understand why they keep getting inflation when they vote for more spending and less taxation. Yes, smart people use their intelligence to be wrong in novel ways, but it's a process that in many areas converges.
This is conflating the fact that Von Neumann's technical aptitude was controlled by highly intelligent people with social and political aptitude with strong progressive / democratic values guiding public opinion with a sense that Von Neumann was being guided by the People and their average intelligence.
If the world were entirely composed of 100 IQ people, the world would be so much worse by any reasonable set of values. We wouldn't have an internet, we'd be missing most treatments for currently existing diseases, we'd lose great art and music (Scott Alexander's brother is a famous musician. Coincidence? lol). This isn't neutral!
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That was very beautifully said. I will notify you when I marry her.
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I have previously commented that I am sloppy about food safety and have never experienced anything that I would consider a meaningful bout of food poisoning. I am here to report that this is no longer the case! As of last Friday, I have become acquainted with the joys of severe gastroenteritis. The vomiting and diarrhea, those I expected to be the case from the reports and I wouldn't surprised. A fever, sure, that's to be expected. The other stuff shouldn't be a surprise if you reason through it, but wow, much worse than I thought! Other adverse effects:
I still have the lingering effects from the general gut health damage and lack of nutrition. Weighing myself this morning (well rehydrated at this point, so not at the worst of things) I'm about 8 pounds lighter than I was on Friday. Very bad, actually! On the bright side, this morning was also the first time I felt my strength starting to return and I was able to just do a normal walk with the dog. After days of being unable to summon the strength to go downstairs, that's good progress!
On the whole, I'm not sure that it's quite sufficient to make me rethink my approach to food safety, but I'll say that it was a bad enough bout that it resets how I think about food poisoning and level sets just how unpleasant I would expect it to be.
There's a giant Listeria outbreak in Delis over here, which I'm pretty sure lead to me shitting my brains out last Monday all day. Boars Head has recalled another seven million pounds of meat. So you're probably on the right track with the deli ham. I'm 90% sure that's what got me.
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Because this is how my mind works: What food or drink was the culprit?
Edit: I see you answered below.
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What do you use to track your sleep and produce a sleep score?
A Garmin epix watch. I would say the scores generally match my felt experience pretty closely. It's neat to see how quick you drop down to deep sleep when you're healthy but physically exhausted from the day.
It also gives HRV data and a stress score that's largely HRV derived. The data over the weekend was wild in general. On the flip side, it was actually nice to see some objective measurement of just how bad off I was dropping to help reassure me that I don't really need to do anything other than lie there, drink fluids, and get better when I get better.
Amazon tells me this is in the arena of $500-$1,000 depending on vintage and features. Is that accurate?
I definitely want to track my sleep quality, but am absolutely paranoid that a lot of the devices out there are woo-woo bullshit. Don't mind spendin', just want to spend right.
Whoop is excellent for this without all the doodads of a running watch like a Garmin.
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Yep, it was a new Gen 2 when it first came out. Had a corporate discount, so it was $800. So cheap I couldn't afford not to buy it! That and a buddy got one, so I had to keep up.
I like the data, but I mostly got it for the actual running features. The GPS accuracy is superb, the battery life is long, and the running dynamics provide some cool data (e.g. stride length, cadence, estimated power including wind, elevation of stride). The AMOLED screen was the nicest they were likely to have for quite some time, so on something that I wear all the time I valued that a fair bit.
Overall, not something I would recommend dollar for dollar unless running or another sport where GPS data is important. A huge amount of what you're paying for is Garmin's high-quality GPS. Their software used to suck, but it's now excellent as well and allows really nice integration with other platforms.
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Do you have any suspicions as to what it was?
Not really. The main potential culprit I can think of was some deli ham, but I cooked it, so it's not the most likely offender. If there was some obviously sketchy choice made, I'd probably be rethinking that approach! All I can think is that I must have screwed up and contaminated something.
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